CBNNews.com - Wednesday marks the annual World Cancer Day, a campaign effort to reduce the number of lives affected by the disease.

Campaigners will focus on encouraging children to live healthy lifestyles with the slogan, "I love my healthy and active childhood."

The campaign's five year plan annually provides a new way to prevent cancer through simple life choices.

Parents, teachers, health workers, and guardians are called on to help children make healthy choices that will follow them into adulthood. They are encouraging children to avoid obesity by eating a balanced diet and by being physically active.

"Unbalanced diet and physical inactivity are behaviors which are learned early in life," said Dr. Ala Alwan, Assistant Director-General, Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health, World Health Organization.

"Both these behaviors are important risk factors for cancer. By targeting children with positive health messages and providing the appropriate environments to facilitate behavior change, we can substantially contribute to cancer prevention," he said.

Doctors also a renewed warnings about the link between obesity and the diseases, that being overweight significantly raises your risk of getting cancer.

Dr. Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, said these cancer prevention strategies should be made global.

"Overweight and obesity are now recognized as one of the areas of lifestyle where risk factors are common between cardiovascular disease and cancer," Wild said.

"Prevention strategies therefore should be common for global health, and so promotion of a healthy diet and physical activity early in life should be part of an integrated approach," he added.

According to the WHO, 1 billion adults are overweight worldwide and 300 million of those people are clinically obese. The risk for certain types of cancer double for every five points a person is on the omptimal body mass index scale.

The World Cancer Research Fund reports that 30 to 40 percent of new cancer cases can be prevented through good diet and exercise.

This year, about 11 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed worldwide and 7 million will die of the disease.